BoatBanter.com - Former Virginia Gubernatorial Candidate Assaulted in Home

On 11/19/13, 10:18 PM, Mr. Luddite wrote:

On 11/19/2013 8:47 PM, wrote:

On Tue, 19 Nov 2013 19:41:29 -0500, BAR wrote:

The sad thing is that the kid, the one who offed himself, was
released because they didn't
have a bed in a pshyc facility available for him. I guess closing
down all of the mental
healht care facilities and releasing all of the nut jobs in the 70's
served its purpose.

That was mostly caused by a series of cases where the courts decided
involuntary commitment equated to depriving a person of liberty and
could only be imposed by due process. (14th amendment).
Subsequent laws that defined "evaluations" further restricted exactly
how long someone can be held with or without a court order.

We don't know the details of this sad event, so this is pure speculation
on my part, but it wouldn't surprise me if drug and/or alcohol addiction
is involved with Gus (the son) still in total denial.

The early reports indicate he had been released from an area hospital
Monday following a mental health evaluation. That could also have been
an overnight "detox" period followed by the mental health evaluation.

Getting a court order for involuntary commitment is difficult. Laws
protect the rights of the person in question. A shrink's evaluation
that the person "could" or "might" hurt himself or others is not
sufficient in itself to cause a judge to order an involuntary
commitment. The person has to actually hurt him/herself (attempt
suicide) or cause injury to another person in order to be involuntarily
committed in most circumstances. This was explained to me last year
when I was involved in getting someone some help for severe alcoholism.
The fact that the person in question had a blood alcohol level that is
considered "lethal" (450) and had been driving a car in a reckless
manner (endangering others) still wasn't sufficient. I was
flabbergasted to learn this, but that's the law.

If the person in question is still in a state of denial of their
addiction, but hasn't actually hurt him/herself or anyone else, it's
tough to have them involuntarily committed.

My speculation is that this may be the case in this situation. If Gus
had been determined to be an *immediate* threat to himself or others by
virtue of demonstrated action, a bed would have been found.

I would guess there are a couple of detox facilities out there in rural
Virginia, but no real psych hospital. The dad had to be flown to
Charlottesville for treatment of his knife wounds, which tells me there
isn't even much of a general hospital out there. It's a lightly
populated county.

Here's a bit from another news report:

Streeting...is an issue Virginia has struggled with before. In 2011,
Virginia inspector general G. Douglas Bevelacqua released a report
chastising the state for turning away in a month an estimated 200
patients determined to be a threat to themselves or others who met the
criteria for a temporary detention, only because state facilities lacked
the room to hold them. Twenty-three of Virginia’s 40 community-services
boards acknowledged that “streeting” occurred at their facilities.

“I wouldn’t say this happens every day, but it’s more common than we’d
like for it to be,” Mary Ann Bergeron, the executive director of the
Virginia Association of Community Services Board, told the Washington Post.

Under Virginia’s emergency-custody-order process, the family of a
patient petitions a magistrate to order an evaluation, and medical staff
have a four-hour window to decide whether someone should be committed,
according to Cropper, who declined to speak about the specifics of the
Deeds case out of respect for the family’s privacy. The clock starts
when a sheriff picks up the patient and brings him or her in for
clinical evaluation. Once the evaluation is complete, physicians make a
recommendation to the magistrate. If the magistrate approves, medical
staff then search for an available hospital bed.

It all has to happen during the four-hour time frame. “We can sometimes
get an extension of two hours on that, but beyond the six hours we
cannot. So if we don’t find a bed within six hours, then an individual
would have to be released. We can’t keep them,” says Cropper.

The availability of inpatient psychiatric care has decreased nationally
in recent years. Research from the Treatment Advocacy Center, a national
nonprofit focused on eliminating barriers to treatment of severe mental
illness, found that the number of state psychiatric beds decreased
nationwide by 14% between 2005 and 2010. In 2005 there were 50,509 state
psychiatric beds nationwide, and in 2010 there were 43,318. It’s
estimated that a person with severe mental illness is three times more
likely to be in a state prison than a psychiatric hospital.

Tightening state budgets have widened the gap in available beds. In the
wake of the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting that claimed 32 lives,
Virginia’s legislature took measures to revamp the emergency-evaluation
processes, updated the criteria for involuntary psychiatric commitment
and raised state funding for community mental-health services. But
according to a report from the National Alliance on Mental Illness,
Virginia’s overall state mental-health budget decreased $37.7 million
dollars from $424.3 million to $386.6 million between fiscal years 2009
and 2012.

“The consequences of not providing treatment should demonstrate the
importance of the need for it,” says Kristina Ragosta, director of
advocacy at the Treatment Advocacy Center. “Most people with mental
illness are no more violent than the general population, but when we
talk about people with untreated mental illness, they are at greater
risk of committing violent acts.”

--
The four to six hour window for evaluation in Virginia is an absurdity,
especially in a rural area where there are not likely to be
professionals qualified to evaluate potential psychiatric patients.
Certainly a regular physician can tell if an individual is "raving,"
but I'm not sure they can evaluate a more difficult case. Psychiatric
diagnosis depends upon more than accurately noting "visible" problems or
the results of blood tests.